and you'll generally find that voting NO to Republicans will coincide with voting NO to the further erosion of civil liberties
Unless you consider smoking a civil liberty. Or controling the property that you own. Or free speech during a political campaign. Or free speech on campus. Or free speech in the workplace. Or free speech in advertising. Or the free exercise of religion. Or the right to bear arms. Or keeping the money in your paycheck. Or being admitted to college without being discriminated against based on your race. Or buying a home where you want to live. Or driving the car that you want to drive. Or using a snowmobile. Or hunting. Or wearing a fur coat. Or using an off-road vehicle. Or eating at a fast food restaurant. Or shopping at Walmart. Or talking on a cell phone. Or using nuclear power. Or owning and running a business. Or home-schooling your children. Or choosing your children's school. Or making any other choices about how your children are raised. Or buying non-organic food. Or buying health care with your own money.
None of those count as civil liberties for Democrats. If you want to do any of those things, you have to do them the way you're told. Or else.
But no wire-tapping terrorist phones to prevent another 9/11 style attack. That's sacrosanct.
I guess it was an assumption. Why else would someone threaten Brandeis University?
It's not important though. The FBI should investigate threats against anyone, minority or not.
I don't applaud the librarian for getting in the way of the FBI unless she had no choice. If someone was threatened, she should have helped the FBI if she was allowed to -- so the person who made the threats could be caught before they hurt someone.
I don't get your comment. Are you saying the Jewish folks at Brandeis University aren't a minority? Or maybe you just don't like Jewish folks? Or maybe you don't care about threats against anyone, minority or otherwise? It just wasn't clear.
f they were in the news more for finding serial killers and recovering kidnapped children than they were for using the PATRIOTACT, then perhaps. There is a use for an FBI, but not this one.
The FBI is bad because of the choices of newspaper editors. Wow. That's brilliant. Can I mod you super-duper-Insightful?
I bet if the FBI started putting out press releases and pimping their kidnapping and murder solving success, you'd say it was "propaganda".
You know our society is in a sad state of affairs when someone demanding a warrant is newsworthy. This type of behavior should be the norm, not the exception.
Yeah, the FBI sucks -- trying to investigate threats against minorities before someone gets hurt. Who do they think they are? They have a lot of nerve asking for help from a public library.
This is no different than a Police Officer asking to search your car after you were pulled over.
No it isn't. You own your car. You have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your car.
The librarian doesn't own the computers at the public library, and there's no reasonable expectation of privacy at a public library.
When the police ask to search your car, you should always say no. When there's been a threat sent from the library computers you might want to consider cooperating before innocent people are hurt -- if you care about that sort of thing.
Sounds like conspiracy theory type thinking: "I know this thing that all the rest of the people are wrong about."
It has to be true, because you have a lot of your self-worth invested in the fact that you're smarter/more informed/more open-minded than everyone else. You're on the inside, and all the rest of us have you to thank for telling us this amazing new counter-intuitive "fact" that contradicts the conventional wisdom. Hence the bold in your comment, I guess.
Careful of falling into that trap.
I'm pretty sure food causes weight gain. Diet sodas might lead people to eat more food, but it's the food that matters.
While, I can believe that there is a small portion of the population that is fat just because they eat too much, I'm not buying that it is a primary cause of being fat.
You're simply wrong.
I posted this elsewhere in this topic. I lost over 100 pounds by eating less (and I walked 1 hour a day).
I got the idea when I concluded that those Ethiopians who died in that famine in the 1980s didn't look that thin because they got too much exercise. They didn't get that way on Atkins either. They didn't get less big-boned. They didn't change their genetics. They didn't get cured of an obesity virus. It wasn't because they had high metabolisms. It wasn't from a lifetime of healthy eating habits.
Maybe you think it is fine for one person to eat 2900 calories a day, do little exercise, and stay thin; while another person eats 2000 calories, walks six miles and gains weight. But how is the second person going to control their weight in the long run?
That second person has a serious medical condition (and/or they're just lying about their food intake), so I'd suggest they control their weight very carefully, with the help of several doctors.
The only practical way we have of controlling calorie intake is our appetite. Have you ever tried measuring your exact calorie intake while eating a normal diet?
Nope. Only on diets where I lost weight. I doubt those can be considered normal.
It's far from easy.
It's actually quite easy to find a way eat and count your calories. But even if it's not, if you want to lose weight (or accomplish anything else of consequence), you have to do some things that aren't easy.
Moreover, how are people to know how much they should be eating, if it's 2000 for one person and 3000 for someone else of similar size, shape, and exercise habits?
Write it down in a spreadsheet. Calculate your caloric intake and use. Weigh yourself. Average out the peaks and valleys. If you're gaining weight, increase output or decrease intake. Repeat until thin.
We can't all become dietary scientists, walking about with computers and clipboards, weighing every bite of food we eat.
Especially if you don't want to lose weight. But you could try it for 6 months, and it would probably work. You could make an effort. If you didn't lose weight, you could increase the effort or refocus the effort into a slightly different plan.
It's not that easy for people in general. 52 pounds in 3 months sounds like a typo. If it isn't, then it's pretty amazing.
But someone who needs to lose weight doesn't have to lose 52 pounds in 3 months. Even 10-20 pounds in 3 months is a huge accomplishment. It's not a race.
The problem is that eat well and exercise to get skinny has been pretty well debunked by huge portions of the population.
And about 999 out of 1000 of those people eat too much food for them to lose weight. "Eat well" is bunk. "Eat less" works. Seriously, it does.
Re:There's a feedback system. Virus affects it...
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Obesity Contagious?
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· Score: 1
Lack of self-control has essentially nothing to do with it. With near-superhuman self-control an obese person might substitute external feedback (i.e. from a scale) for the internal signals and control his weight that way. But that means ignoring continuous gnawing hunger - forever.
Interesting you say that. Hunger can be just the opposite. When I was losing 100 pounds, hunger was my success signal. If I was hungry, I was losing weight. If I was full, I was getting fatter. When I started to get weak from hunger, I'd eat. (At least ideally. Sometimes I'd eat earlier or too much, which could be a small setback.) You get used to a little mild hunger. It can be a good feeling, like the soreness you get after exercising. And, wow, does it ever make your food taste good.
They have only been on that island for about 50 days so far. A real big guy like that can lose 25 pounds without it being apparent. And 25 pounds is an almost impossibly amazing amount of weight for anyone to lose in 50 days.
So get back to us in 3 years and you might have a point.
Suggestion: Ask someone from your church (or whatever) to count your calories for you. Maybe shop for you and set out meals for each day. It's OK to ask for help.
Otherwise, quit one of your jobs.
Also, if you're willing to be hungry all the time, you don't need to exercise and you can lose weight just by eating less food.
Re:Obesity comes from a simple condition...
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Obesity Contagious?
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· Score: 1
Lots of people think they eat "healthy", but they still eat more calories than they use. Eating too much healthy food will make you gain weight. It's not what you eat, it's how much.
Re:Obesity comes from a simple condition...
on
Obesity Contagious?
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· Score: 1
Different people output different amounts of energy. Some people burn hundreds of calories just sitting in front of the TV, because they are jittery. Others can work out every day and still just barely keep up with the caloric intake of a healthy diet.
It's harder for some people. They need to try harder. It's not fair. They need to do it anyway.
If staying in shape comes relatively easy for you, I find it quite repugnant to ascribe the failure of less-lucky folk to stay skinny to some moral shortcoming.
It's not a moral shortcoming. It may not even be a shortage of effort relative to other people. It is a shortage of effort relative to the amount of effort required to succeed.
And I'm saying this as somebody who runs 3-4 miles a day and drastically limits his sugar intake.
It's calorie intake that matters. Any kind of calories. If you can't bear to give up your cookies, then eat 1 cookie, and give up something else that's got the same number of calories.
For me, staying healthy is a part-time career that occupies a good chunk of my day. As hard as it is for me, I know for a fact that there are a lot of overweight people who could not possibly live my lifestyle.
Indeed. I lost 100 pounds. It takes a LOT of time and effort. (I ate cookies almost every day during those 20 months, BTW.)
For one thing, their knees would cruble in a matter of weeks. For another, their various food cravings are a lot stronger than mine.
Once again, this just means they need to do exercise that won't injure them and try harder to eat less.
Maybe some of them can pull it off
I think they can.
but there are addictive drugs out there which have a better rate of recovery than obesity. Shouldn't we all consider that there may be more treatment required than shouting "stop being so lazy, fatty" at them?
Yes, but mostly because even lazy folks can lose weight by eating less. Exercise is a minor part of the equation. You can walk for an hour and eat that many calories in 90 seconds.
Being mean to people isn't the answer. But neither is offering them excuses. The simplest, and most useful answer is less food.
When trying to lose weight, eating better is much more important than eating less.
I lost 100 pounds, and I can tell you this is 100% incorrect, at least in my case. A small amount of junk food is better than a large amount of "good" food. It's calories eaten vs. calories used. Period. I ate cookies almost every day when I was losing weight.
After I started eating "better" I started gaining weight again.
Find exercise you like doing.
This is good advice.
Re:Conservation of energy revoked?
on
Obesity Contagious?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It's not widely reported, but lots of dieting fat people die and/or suffer severe health problems from malnutrition every year. Still fat, yet starved of required nutrients.
Vitamin pills?
We've tried bullying fat people to "quit eating so much and go for a walk" for decades now
Funny, that's how I lost over 100 pounds. (Five pounds a month for 20 months in a row.)
It works. Mostly the part about eating less. I got the idea when I realized that the Ethiopians who died in that famine didn't look so thin because they got too much exercise.
"economics, study of how human beings allocate scarce resources to produce various commodities and how those commodities are distributed for consumption among the people in society (see distribution). The essence of economics lies in the fact that resources are scarce, or at least limited, and that not all human needs and desires can be met."
It does not predict *anything*.
(further down on that same page)
Economics is said to be normative when it recommends one choice over another, or when a subjective value judgment is made. Conversely, economics is said to be positive when it tries objectively to predict and explain consequences of choices, given a set of assumptions and/or a set of observations.
(bold added by me in both cases)
And, if that is our answer, it certainly does a piss-poor job of allocating water and food so far, doesn't it?
One thing economics doesn't do is try to make you happy about the results of people's choices. All it does is help us understand them.
I know something about patents. Say I develop (and market, and sell) a product. It turns out I infringed a patent. The patent holder is entitled to damages. It's a license fee per item sold. If I did it on purpose, it's 3x the license fee.
If I design and never sell or use a product, and it turns out I infringe a patent in the design, then I don't think there's any basis for damages. And 3x=0 when x=0. Is this incorrect?
What's the basis for damages in a research project? (I don't understand what the value of these licenses are for research that's not specifically intended to lead to a product.)
Slashdot Mirror
The result of this will be less choice for iPod buyers. The iPods will be artificially limited so you can't play them very loud.
Lawsuit reform anyone?
and you'll generally find that voting NO to Republicans will coincide with voting NO to the further erosion of civil liberties
Unless you consider smoking a civil liberty.
Or controling the property that you own.
Or free speech during a political campaign.
Or free speech on campus.
Or free speech in the workplace.
Or free speech in advertising.
Or the free exercise of religion.
Or the right to bear arms.
Or keeping the money in your paycheck.
Or being admitted to college without being discriminated against based on your race.
Or buying a home where you want to live.
Or driving the car that you want to drive.
Or using a snowmobile.
Or hunting.
Or wearing a fur coat.
Or using an off-road vehicle.
Or eating at a fast food restaurant.
Or shopping at Walmart.
Or talking on a cell phone.
Or using nuclear power.
Or owning and running a business.
Or home-schooling your children.
Or choosing your children's school.
Or making any other choices about how your children are raised.
Or buying non-organic food.
Or buying health care with your own money.
None of those count as civil liberties for Democrats. If you want to do any of those things, you have to do them the way you're told. Or else.
But no wire-tapping terrorist phones to prevent another 9/11 style attack. That's sacrosanct.
I guess it was an assumption. Why else would someone threaten Brandeis University?
It's not important though. The FBI should investigate threats against anyone, minority or not.
I don't applaud the librarian for getting in the way of the FBI unless she had no choice. If someone was threatened, she should have helped the FBI if she was allowed to -- so the person who made the threats could be caught before they hurt someone.
I don't get your comment. Are you saying the Jewish folks at Brandeis University aren't a minority? Or maybe you just don't like Jewish folks? Or maybe you don't care about threats against anyone, minority or otherwise? It just wasn't clear.
Children with dead parents shouldn't just be abandoned to their kidnappers.
f they were in the news more for finding serial killers and recovering kidnapped children than they were for using the PATRIOTACT, then perhaps. There is a use for an FBI, but not this one.
The FBI is bad because of the choices of newspaper editors. Wow. That's brilliant. Can I mod you super-duper-Insightful?
I bet if the FBI started putting out press releases and pimping their kidnapping and murder solving success, you'd say it was "propaganda".
You know our society is in a sad state of affairs when someone demanding a warrant is newsworthy. This type of behavior should be the norm, not the exception.
Yeah, the FBI sucks -- trying to investigate threats against minorities before someone gets hurt. Who do they think they are? They have a lot of nerve asking for help from a public library.
Also, I don't see how someone could kidnap my child if I was a good parent and actually parented the child at all times, as a parent should.
By shooting you in head before grabbing the kid?
This is no different than a Police Officer asking to search your car after you were pulled over.
No it isn't. You own your car. You have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your car.
The librarian doesn't own the computers at the public library, and there's no reasonable expectation of privacy at a public library.
When the police ask to search your car, you should always say no. When there's been a threat sent from the library computers you might want to consider cooperating before innocent people are hurt -- if you care about that sort of thing.
Sounds like conspiracy theory type thinking: "I know this thing that all the rest of the people are wrong about."
It has to be true, because you have a lot of your self-worth invested in the fact that you're smarter/more informed/more open-minded than everyone else. You're on the inside, and all the rest of us have you to thank for telling us this amazing new counter-intuitive "fact" that contradicts the conventional wisdom. Hence the bold in your comment, I guess.
Careful of falling into that trap.
I'm pretty sure food causes weight gain. Diet sodas might lead people to eat more food, but it's the food that matters.
While, I can believe that there is a small portion of the population that is fat just because they eat too much, I'm not buying that it is a primary cause of being fat.
You're simply wrong.
I posted this elsewhere in this topic. I lost over 100 pounds by eating less (and I walked 1 hour a day).
I got the idea when I concluded that those Ethiopians who died in that famine in the 1980s didn't look that thin because they got too much exercise. They didn't get that way on Atkins either. They didn't get less big-boned. They didn't change their genetics. They didn't get cured of an obesity virus. It wasn't because they had high metabolisms. It wasn't from a lifetime of healthy eating habits.
It was from eating less.
Maybe you think it is fine for one person to eat 2900 calories a day, do little exercise, and stay thin; while another person eats 2000 calories, walks six miles and gains weight. But how is the second person going to control their weight in the long run?
That second person has a serious medical condition (and/or they're just lying about their food intake), so I'd suggest they control their weight very carefully, with the help of several doctors.
The only practical way we have of controlling calorie intake is our appetite. Have you ever tried measuring your exact calorie intake while eating a normal diet?
Nope. Only on diets where I lost weight. I doubt those can be considered normal.
It's far from easy.
It's actually quite easy to find a way eat and count your calories. But even if it's not, if you want to lose weight (or accomplish anything else of consequence), you have to do some things that aren't easy.
Moreover, how are people to know how much they should be eating, if it's 2000 for one person and 3000 for someone else of similar size, shape, and exercise habits?
Write it down in a spreadsheet. Calculate your caloric intake and use. Weigh yourself. Average out the peaks and valleys. If you're gaining weight, increase output or decrease intake. Repeat until thin.
We can't all become dietary scientists, walking about with computers and clipboards, weighing every bite of food we eat.
Especially if you don't want to lose weight. But you could try it for 6 months, and it would probably work. You could make an effort. If you didn't lose weight, you could increase the effort or refocus the effort into a slightly different plan.
Making excuses certainly doesn't help.
It's not that easy for people in general. 52 pounds in 3 months sounds like a typo. If it isn't, then it's pretty amazing.
But someone who needs to lose weight doesn't have to lose 52 pounds in 3 months. Even 10-20 pounds in 3 months is a huge accomplishment. It's not a race.
The problem is that eat well and exercise to get skinny has been pretty well debunked by huge portions of the population.
And about 999 out of 1000 of those people eat too much food for them to lose weight. "Eat well" is bunk. "Eat less" works. Seriously, it does.
Lack of self-control has essentially nothing to do with it. With near-superhuman self-control an obese person might substitute external feedback (i.e. from a scale) for the internal signals and control his weight that way. But that means ignoring continuous gnawing hunger - forever.
Interesting you say that. Hunger can be just the opposite. When I was losing 100 pounds, hunger was my success signal. If I was hungry, I was losing weight. If I was full, I was getting fatter. When I started to get weak from hunger, I'd eat. (At least ideally. Sometimes I'd eat earlier or too much, which could be a small setback.) You get used to a little mild hunger. It can be a good feeling, like the soreness you get after exercising. And, wow, does it ever make your food taste good.
They have only been on that island for about 50 days so far. A real big guy like that can lose 25 pounds without it being apparent. And 25 pounds is an almost impossibly amazing amount of weight for anyone to lose in 50 days.
So get back to us in 3 years and you might have a point.
Suggestion: Ask someone from your church (or whatever) to count your calories for you. Maybe shop for you and set out meals for each day. It's OK to ask for help.
Otherwise, quit one of your jobs.
Also, if you're willing to be hungry all the time, you don't need to exercise and you can lose weight just by eating less food.
Lots of people think they eat "healthy", but they still eat more calories than they use. Eating too much healthy food will make you gain weight. It's not what you eat, it's how much.
Different people output different amounts of energy. Some people burn hundreds of calories just sitting in front of the TV, because they are jittery. Others can work out every day and still just barely keep up with the caloric intake of a healthy diet.
It's harder for some people. They need to try harder. It's not fair. They need to do it anyway.
If staying in shape comes relatively easy for you, I find it quite repugnant to ascribe the failure of less-lucky folk to stay skinny to some moral shortcoming.
It's not a moral shortcoming. It may not even be a shortage of effort relative to other people. It is a shortage of effort relative to the amount of effort required to succeed.
And I'm saying this as somebody who runs 3-4 miles a day and drastically limits his sugar intake.
It's calorie intake that matters. Any kind of calories. If you can't bear to give up your cookies, then eat 1 cookie, and give up something else that's got the same number of calories.
For me, staying healthy is a part-time career that occupies a good chunk of my day. As hard as it is for me, I know for a fact that there are a lot of overweight people who could not possibly live my lifestyle.
Indeed. I lost 100 pounds. It takes a LOT of time and effort. (I ate cookies almost every day during those 20 months, BTW.)
For one thing, their knees would cruble in a matter of weeks. For another, their various food cravings are a lot stronger than mine.
Once again, this just means they need to do exercise that won't injure them and try harder to eat less.
Maybe some of them can pull it off
I think they can.
but there are addictive drugs out there which have a better rate of recovery than obesity. Shouldn't we all consider that there may be more treatment required than shouting "stop being so lazy, fatty" at them?
Yes, but mostly because even lazy folks can lose weight by eating less. Exercise is a minor part of the equation. You can walk for an hour and eat that many calories in 90 seconds.
Being mean to people isn't the answer. But neither is offering them excuses. The simplest, and most useful answer is less food.
When trying to lose weight, eating better is much more important than eating less.
I lost 100 pounds, and I can tell you this is 100% incorrect, at least in my case. A small amount of junk food is better than a large amount of "good" food. It's calories eaten vs. calories used. Period. I ate cookies almost every day when I was losing weight.
After I started eating "better" I started gaining weight again.
Find exercise you like doing.
This is good advice.
It's not widely reported, but lots of dieting fat people die and/or suffer severe health problems from malnutrition every year. Still fat, yet starved of required nutrients.
Vitamin pills?
We've tried bullying fat people to "quit eating so much and go for a walk" for decades now
Funny, that's how I lost over 100 pounds. (Five pounds a month for 20 months in a row.)
It works. Mostly the part about eating less. I got the idea when I realized that the Ethiopians who died in that famine didn't look so thin because they got too much exercise.
This is what I was thinking. You don't tend to need to license a patent to "investigate" things. At least I didn't think so.
Some sort of uniform default licensing scheme for patents would probably help a lot of people though.
Economics
It does not predict *anything*.
(further down on that same page)
(bold added by me in both cases)
And, if that is our answer, it certainly does a piss-poor job of allocating water and food so far, doesn't it?
One thing economics doesn't do is try to make you happy about the results of people's choices. All it does is help us understand them.
I know something about patents. Say I develop (and market, and sell) a product. It turns out I infringed a patent. The patent holder is entitled to damages. It's a license fee per item sold. If I did it on purpose, it's 3x the license fee.
If I design and never sell or use a product, and it turns out I infringe a patent in the design, then I don't think there's any basis for damages. And 3x=0 when x=0. Is this incorrect?
What's the basis for damages in a research project? (I don't understand what the value of these licenses are for research that's not specifically intended to lead to a product.)
Now consider that, to do research involving these genes, you need to purchase a "license" first.
Why? What's the penalty for just doing the research? Is it that you can't ultimately profit from the result?